Removal of river bed substrate around bridge pier and abutment footings, also known as scour, presents a significant cost and risk in the maintenance of many bridges throughout the world. Bridge scour at the foundations of bridge piers and abutments is one of the most common causes of highway bridge failures. It has been estimated that 60% of all bridge failures result from scour and other hydraulic-related causes (Hunt, 2009). In 1973, a study by the US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) was conducted to investigate 383 bridge failures caused by catastrophic floods, and it concluded that 25 percent involved pier damage and 72 percent involved abutment damage (Richardson and Davies, 2001). This has motivated research on the causes of scour at bridge piers and abutments (Ettema et al., 2004) and led bridge engineers to develop numerous countermeasures that attempt to reduce the risk of catastrophe. Unfortunately, all such countermeasures currently in existence and practice are temporary responses that cannot endure throughout the lifetime of the bridge and do not prevent the formation of scouring vortices, which are the root cause of local scour. Consequently, sediment such as sand and rocks from around the foundations of bridge abutments and piers is loosened and carried away by the flow during floods, which may compromise the integrity of the structure. When these temporary scour countermeasures are used for at-risk bridges, expensive monitoring technologies and support professionals are required to enable sufficient time for implementing contingency plans when failure is likely. Even designing bridge piers or abutments with the expectation of some scour is highly uncertain, since a study (Sheppard et al., 2011) showed huge uncertainties in scour data from hundreds of experiments. Other than the innovation of Simpson et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 8,348,553), none of the conservative current bridge pier and abutment footing or foundation designs prevents scouring vortices, so the probability of scour during high water or floods is present in all of those designs.
The bridge foundations in a water current (WC), such as piers (P) and abutments (A), change the local hydraulics drastically because of the generation of large-scale unsteadiness and shedding of coherent vortices, such as horseshoe vortices, by the piers and abutments. FIG. 1 is a sketch of the horseshoe vortex (HV) formed around the base of a bridge pier (P) hydraulic structure by a separating boundary layer. The horseshoe vortex (HV) has high lift and shear stress and triggers the onset of sediment scour and a scour hole (SH) is formed as shown in FIG. 1.
The flow field around a vertical-wall abutment (A) is highly three-dimensional and involves strong separated vortex flow around the abutment as shown in FIG. 2. A separation bubble (SB) is formed at the upstream corner of the abutment. Unsteady shed wake vortices (WV) are created due to the separation of the flow at the abutment corners. These wake vortices (WV) are very unsteady, are oriented approximately vertical and have low pressure at the vortex cores. These vortices act like small tornadoes, lifting up sediment from the sediment bed (SB) and creating a large scour hole (SH) behind the abutment (A) and a downstream scour hole (DSH). The down flow (DF) at the front of the abutment is produced by the large vertical stagnation pressure gradient of the approaching flow. The down flow rolls up and forms the primary vortex (PV) as shown in FIG. 2, which is similar to the formation of the horseshoe vortex around a single bridge pier. FIGS. 3 and 4 show the flowfield (FF) past a wing-wall abutment (A) and spill-through abutment (A), respectively, where deep contraction scour can occur due to vortices, high turbulence (HT), and flow separation zones (FS).
Bridge scour is comprised of three components: long-term aggradations and degradation of the river bed, general scour at the bridge, and local scour at the piers or abutments (Lagasse et al. 2001). The structural countermeasures are used primarily to minimize local scour, such as extended footings, scour collars, pier shape modifications, debris deflectors, and sacrificial piles, all of which are only marginally effective. A number of collar devices (Titman, U.S. Pat. No. 3,529,427; de Werk, U.S. Pat. No. 4,279,545; Larsen, U.S. Pat. No. 3,830,066; Larsen, U.S. Pat. No. 3,844,123; and Pedersen, U.S. Pat. No. 3,859,803) encircle the lower end of hydraulic structures, but do not prevent scour on the downstream side of the structure. A similar anti-scour apparatus comprising an upper and a lower collar was patented by Loer (U.S. Pat. No. 4,717,286). Larsen (U.S. Pat. No. 4,114,394) describes the use of a sheet or sack housing film material, which is secured around a hydraulic structure with cables. All of the above collar devices would only have a local effect and local scour will still happen around the vicinity of the collar, as shown by Tian et al. (2010) in work performed in the flume at Applied University Research (AUR). In U.S. Pat. No. 5,839,853 (Oppenheimer and Saunders), one structure of vortex generators, located upstream of the hydraulic structure, is specified to produce a pair of stream-wise vortices that move toward the free surface and protect the hydraulic structure from the impact of oncoming debris. Another structure of vortex generators is positioned directly in front of the hydraulic structure to prevent the streambed from scouring by counteracting the horseshoe vortex (also sometimes called the necklace vortex) formed by separation at the hydraulic structure nose if there was no control. Simpson (2001) showed that this counteracting mechanism fails as a scour countermeasure.
For abutments, Barkdoll et al. (2007) reviewed the selection and design of existing bridge abutment countermeasures for older bridges, such as parallel walls, spur dikes located locally to the abutment, and horizontal collar-type plates attached to the abutment. Two similar collar devices (Lee et al., U.S. patent Ser. No. 10/493,100; Mountain, U.S. patent Ser. No. 11/664,991) are comprised of a number of interlocking blocks or bags in a monolayer or multilayer on the stream bed around abutments. However, these horizontal collar type scour countermeasures are only marginally effective as shown in the flume test results of Tian et al. (2010). The scour hole at the upstream abutment corner is eliminated, but the downstream scour hole due to the wake vortex shedding becomes more severe. In another approach to prevent streambed scour of a moving body of water, a scour platform is constructed by placing an excavation adjacent to the body of water (Barrett & Ruckman, U.S. Pat. No. 6,890,127). The excavation is covered with stabilizing sheet material, filled with aggregate, and extends up or downstream a desired length. However, the local scour around the excavation is inevitable, especially when the excavation is exposed to a moving body of water.
With the above prior art, Simpson et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 8,348,553) proved through model-scale and full-scale tests and disclosed a manufactured three-dimensional convex-concave fairing with attached vortex generators, for hydraulic structures such as bridge piers and abutments, whose shape prevents the local scour problem around such hydraulic structures even when the inflow is at an angle of attack to the hydraulic structure (FIGS. 5 and 6). The Simpson et al. device is effective at preventing vortices that cause substrate transport for a large range of river flow conditions and bed substrate materials because it fundamentally alters the way the river flows around the pier.
FIG. 5 shows flow around the Simpson et al. device streamlined bridge pier fairing that remains attached without the formation of vortices. The convex-concave pier fairing nose (CCPFN) is located below the faired pier nose (FPN) and prevents the formation of vortices, as does the faired side (FS). The vortex generators (VG) cause the near wall flow to be energized before it moves over the downstream convex-concave fairing (DCCF) that is below the faired downstream stern (FDS).
FIG. 6 shows a retrofit to an abutment with a faired abutment nose (FAN), a faired convex-concave abutment nose (FCCN), a faired abutment side (FS), vortex generators (VG), a downstream convex-concave fairing, using interlocking key (IK) sections. That device is a conventionally made concrete or fiber-reinforced composite, or combination of both, vortex generator equipped hydrodynamic fairing that is fit or cast over an existing or new hydraulic structure around the base of the structure and above the footing. The vortex generators (VG) are positioned so as to energize decelerating near-wall flow with higher-momentum outer layer flow. The result is a more steady compact separation and wake and substantially mitigated scour inducing wake vortical (WV) flow as shown by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation (FIG. 7).